Survey Results: AI/AN Students Summary

About 12,000 American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) fourth-graders and 10,000 AI/AN eighth-graders participated in the 2009 NIES survey, which was especially focused on the students’ cultural experiences in and out of school. The student questionnaires asked AI/AN students about themselves, their families and communities, and their classrooms and schools. Students completed the questionnaires after the regular NAEP assessments.

Results were reported for three mutually exclusive categories based on the type of school and proportion of AI/AN students:

low density public schools (less than 25 percent of the students are AI/AN)

 high density public schools (25 percent or more of the students are AI/AN)

 Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) schools (which serve AI/AN students almost exclusively)

Patterns in results

Results from the AI/AN student survey typically fell into three broad patterns.

In this pattern, a significant increase in percentages moving from low density, to high density, to BIE schools is shown.  In most of the grade 8 responses shown in the chart below, the percentage of responding AI/AN students in high density schools was higher than the percentage of students in low density schools, and the percentage in BIE schools was the highest of all. For example, AI/AN eighth-graders in BIE schools reported the highest levels of knowledge about their heritage, with eighth-graders in high density schools reporting higher levels of knowledge than their peers in low density schools.

In this pattern, the percentages of responding AI/AN students from low and high density schools were not significantly different from one another, but the percentage of BIE students was higher than both. For example, AI/AN fourth-graders in BIE schools reported higher levels of knowledge about their heritage than students in high and low density schools.

In this pattern, there were no statistically significant differences in the percentages among the three school type/density categories. For example, the percentages of responding AI/AN eighth-graders aspiring to attend college full time after high school were comparable across all school categories.

Key:
 low density public schools
 high density public schools
 Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) schools 

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2009 National Indian Education Study.